Karl

Everything has a nature.

No, that isn't quite true Jim. I stopped conversing via PM. I have no issues in an open forum where anyone is free to join in, I saw no reason to continue privately. That means I can add a reply if I want to do so, or not. On PM it's a more intimate space, once we have exhausted our arguments there is little point in continuing. Neither did I label you as 'a bad guy' or that 'you had nothing to say'. I don't 'hold on' to objectivism either, that's also a misunderstanding, just as I don't hold on to the fact that 1+1=2, it just does regardless of whether that works for me or not.

If it isn't consistent, then it isn't a true virtue.

My resilience or my patience ? I would have thought the former pretty much speaks for itself, the latter has yet to be broken.

No, they are only resources. Water can drown me just as easily as oxygen can create a fire that burns me. You seem to be getting a bit confused. Life must utilise whatever resources it can in order to survive. Those resources are as likely to kill as they are to provide useful products.

Of course it's not part of me. Do you mean if I was cast off into space ? Well then, sans a space suit I would die, but then I'm going to die anyway regardless of space, or ground.

The clothes are not living organisms, neither is the rock. They do not 'support' life functions, you must utilise the environment to support life function. The Rock is inanimate, it does not feed you, cloth you, or provide shelter, you must work to use the resources around you to survive, whatever they happen to be.

Then the Earth is not a living organism, but it hosts living organisms which attempt to survive upon it.

Do you consider rocks living organisms ?

That's a straw man argument. It's not a necessity to know how life began, it's only necessary to use ones mind to survive. Aborigines did not thrive, they almost got wiped out by western man. They had nothing at all to show for 40,000 years except a miserable stone age existence of continual toil. I don't have a crystal ball, but what I do know is denial of reason, ethics and existence has resulted in millions of unnecessary death and suffering. That to continue on with decisions made on mere whim and feelings will be a far less effective survival tool than using the mind. Hence, I suggest we haven't that much time as a civilisation at least, perhaps not as a race either.

Speaking for MH here, he wasn't saying that there wasn't any oxygen, only that there was once very little of it in the primordial atmosphere and that the first living things began converting the carbon dioxide into oxygen like little factories, I'm certain he doesn't think they invented oxygen ;-)

Myths are just erroneous conceptions. You see something come out of an egg, man comes out of a woman, so why not mankind came out of an egg, mountain, mythical beast ? The ancients had no grasp of causality, chemicals, DNA, past history, biology, physics, so they did their best to come up with answers for things, we still do this today.

An animal/human giving birth, a bird coming out of an egg, a plant from a seed, that sort of thing.

I don't know his teachings, but to think objectively is to apply reason. Honesty is a virtue, a moral standard, a principle one chooses to adopt as is objective thinking. Intelligence is the application of the mind to existence. Indeed it might be said that from that excerpt that he agrees completely with Objectivist philosophy. That sounds so absurd that I suggest you have misunderstood what K meant.

Fear of Hillary would be even more rational. As somebody said 'it's the choice between two evils'. What a choice to have to make. The purpose of good is to eradicate evil, not to vote for it. Eradication requires the application of force (active) or the application of denial of consent (passive). Denial of consent is the denial and opposition of EVERYTHING the government does, no matter how beneficial or noble it appears to be, because unless you can fully reason, then you cannot know the reality. Active force requires good to take up physical insurrection, but devoid of reason you cannot know the good. Pragmatism has destroyed critical thinking, it has denied ethics and morals and has left the population stranded on a wide, featureless beach dependent on a man with a bullhorn to tell them how to think, what to think and what to do. Hillary is a crook. Trump got that right. It might be the only thing he said which is truth. She is a lying, thieving, power hungry scum bag.

This is how it is believed life may have started on Earth, just like a seed eventually lands on a suitable piece of fertile soil. The question then moves to how the comet developed life and that would suggest life exists everywhere in a simple bacterial/viral form and develops new varieties on a suitable host planet. Amino acids are the key to life within the DNA structure which suggests life is one more element being created within the universe.

Communism and facism are two sides of the same coin. Communism has the means of production in the control of the state, in facism it is nominally in private hands but the state still controls it. What we have in the USA is an inversion of both ideologies. This perhaps should have been obvious under a democratic system where there is more freedom. Here we have the means of control in the hands of the businessman (not necessarily the producer). In other words this is an Oligarchy, or what I refer to as Neo-Aristocracy. This is what the EU was striving for as a result of US economic domination. Instead of the Government controlling business, it was the businesses that were allowed to direct Government policy. In the US this happened as a result of accidental cronyism, but in the EU it was encouraged deliberately as a recognition that Governments don't really have a clue what the economy needs. Thus the elected Governments in both continents are actually the bureaucratic/political arm of big business. I think Trump is the birth of a the first Neo Aristocrat to come out openly and say that his role will be as leader of this new Aristocracy. Clinton is still pretending that she holds the power to control these Oligarchs, she has used this pretense to make herself wealthy in the manner of a US Royal family. Underneath the visible Government lies the real Goverment and it can be seen if you notice the number of revolving door politicians that re-appear in both Democrat and Republican Governments. In the EU there is not even a pretense at elections. Instead the leaders are chosen internally and only the representatives of each country are chosen-but have little to know power. Democracy, such as we are told we have, is dead. Perhaps with Brexit we may have begun a rebellion that will spread, even if we don't fully implement it, others might. We may even see the USA break up into states once again.

Actually it would by the 80/20 rule and this will always be true. The problem is that the current 20% are the wrong people, productivity has been falling and real wealth has been replaced by debt. Instead of everyone getting wealthier, they have been getting poorer, the difference has been replaced by a mixture of cheap, easy debt and an unsustainable welfare state. People were building turnpikes, toll roads, steam ships, railways, generating plant, steel mills and aircraft long before the state got involved. The Carnegies, Vanderbilt, Rockerfellers were building things that made them wealthy, but in making themselves wealthy they inadvertently made everyone wealthy. Despite their immense wealth they were actually relatively poorer than those that worked in their factories and used their services. If you took those men and those like them off the planet, we would still be farming under feudal lords and starving. The great cities, transport systems, medical advances, communication, food production would not have happened. These deservedly wealthy were unwittingly our servants. Today we have the non deserving wealthy who own a share in a debtors prison.

So what exactly is your argument ? West Germany received Marshall plan funding because it embraced western capitalism. East Germany had to pay because it ended up under a communist system. In other words nothing changes in my example. The problem for East Germany was communism and success for West Germany was the result of capitalism. There were no capital infusions until China moved towards capitalism either. Companies don't invest in communist countries for obvious reasons.

I'm hoping.

What the heck ? Clockwork Orange isn't an instructional film. You want to turn human beings into sacrificial lambs ? You were never like that so I can only conclude you are messing about.

I have a chuckle when you regurgitate perceived wisdom. One of the regular questions asked of free marketeers is 'who will build the roads' ? The answer is that the most succesful infrastructure builders in your own country have been privately financed. Burnt Folsom is good on this. https://youtu.be/4Vw6uF2LdZw Now, I didn't say that you could do without some form of Governance-that's an anarchists stance (Murray Rothbard was a great proponent and he makes some good points economically). The US had limited Government in the early 19th century and it was paid through small tariffs on imported goods. This, it is true to say, is still a form of taxation but it is severely limiting. It has the effect of reducing imports and therefore the revenue stream, which means Governments have to be careful not to ramp it up, unlike income tax (once reserved only for the very wealthiest at a tiny few percentage points). It's not my purpose here to discuss other ways of funding limited Government, but there are other possibilities. Government should be limited to providing law, order and defence of the nation. It should not be into any form of welfarism either corporate, nor public. Just like the Church was seperated from state, so should commerce and state be kept apart as should charity and state. The reason we have become accustomed to the idea that only the state can find infrastructure projects is obvious with a bit of thought. The state doesn't want entrepreneurs because the Government would be seen as less necessary and those that live on the backs of the people as special interest groups don't want competition. The end result is essentially socialism. Those that own the wealth have done so without producing anything and if they did produce, then they did so with massive tax payer funding and a Government that sheltered them from competitors. This is the reason we are in such a bloody mess. The Government has been acting like an entrepreneur that has no restrictions required of an entrepreneur who must avoid loss. Over time the Government has dug ever deeper into producers profits and the money has flowed from the true entrepreneur to the parasitic businessman. Now we have reached the point at which the losses for this behaviour have become unsustainable. The Government has been handing money to these crony capitalists, taking a big chunk for itself and, it has been forced to maintain the living standards of the workers through greater taxation/ welfare payments. Currently the US has a debt of 23 trillion dollars and this is the cost of letting a Government act as an entrepreneur, it has lost money and the debt has fallen on the producers. In an era where the state decides what the build and has taken away the risks of building it, then no one will risk their capital when they can allay the risk onto the tax payer. Eventually this shell game ends when no one produces anything and the state prints money at a rate that destroys the currency completely. This is what will happen to the USA, just as it did to China, Britain, the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire.

That's not entirely true. The laws have been written to benefit those who want to gain what they didn't produce, or earn. Not all wealthy people gained from such laws, many, such as those often branded 'robber barons' were put out of business on the grounds that they were too competitive and drove down the prices to the extent that parasitic businesses were no longer sustainable. The anti-trust laws were designed to get businesses to cartel together, to stop competing with each other, preventing innovation and maximising profit: it works like this; if you are selling low then you are undercutting/dumping, if your price is high then you are price gouging and profiteering, if the price is similar then you are price fixing. Ironically anti-trust laws achieve exactly what they were supposed to prevent. The losers are everyone else. There is no such thing as a 'fair' taxation system. Tax is coercive theft at the point of a gun. Theft is theft, X is X. I don't know anyone that doesn't understand that stealing is an immoral action, they might justify it but that doesn't make it right. If there was a hell, then be assured, those who support taxation are booking their tickets.

Apech, even if we ignore the philosophical error and the economic error, even then we have clear empirical historical evidence that this is not the case. The perfect example-leaving out China, Russia, North Korea-is the immense economic disparity between east and west Germany to the extent that eventually the wall had to fall. You are right to point out that private property is evidence of ego-of course it is. Dead people, or people unborn need no private property. It seems you are falling ever further into a place where authoritarian violence is seen as peaceful co-existence. :-(

Good reason not to vote for any evil then. That's my position. Only one thing is assured by progressives. Progressively less freedom, productivity, peace and happiness. All progressive policies end in blood, misery, poverty and violence. How's that progressive Venezuela doing ? Last week they celebrated Chavez birthday with a £100, 000 cake whilst enacting forced labour laws.